Markham stopped, studying the dizzy height of Great St. Mary’s. A student peered over the edge, a knobby head against the steel blue.
What was the right analogy?
The tachyon beam brought up the same problem. If his ideas were right there was a kind of probability wave traveling back and forth in time. Setting up a paradox kept the wave going in a loop, setting the system into a kind of dumbfounded frenzy, unable to decide on what state it should be in. Something had to choose one. Was there some analogy here, a kind of unmoved observer, who set time flowing forward rather than backward?
If there was, then the paradox had an answer. Somehow the laws of physics had to provide an answer. But the equations stood mute, inscrutable. As was always the case, the basic question answered by the mathematics was how, not why. Did the unmoved mover have to step in? Who was he—God? He might as well be.
Markham shook his head in frustration. The ideas swarmed like bees, but he could not pin them. Abruptly he growled and swerved across a lane of bicycling students, into Bowes & Bowes.
The selection was getting thin; the pubüshing business was in trouble, retreating before the TV tide. A woman tending the register caught his eye; quite sexy. Beyond his age range, though, he thought ruefully. He was getting to the stage where ambitions nearly always exceeded his region of probable success.
The tachyon thing troubled him as he walked home, across the Cav and through the bathing grounds. A greensward, named Lammas Land for some ancient reason, lay beneath a moist, warm afternoon. There was a stillness, as though the year were poised motionless at the top of a long slope up which it had climbed out of winter’s grip, and from which it must soon descend. He turned south, towards Grantchester, where the nuclear reactor was still a-building. It seemed that with all the delays they would never finish the squashed ping-pong ball that would cup the simmering core. The meadows around it were a pocket of rural peace. Cows standing in the inky shade of trees swished their tails to banish flies. There were drowsy sounds, murmurs of wood pigeons, a drone of a plane, buzzings and clickings. The air was layered with scents of thistles, yarrow, ragwort, tansy. Colors leaped in ambush from the lush grass: yellow camomile, blue harebells, the scarlet pimpernel of literary fame.
Jan was reading when he arrived home. They made a lazy sort of love in the close upper bedroom, dampening the sheets. Afterward, the image of the woman in Bowes & Bowes flickered through his dozing mind. A musky fullness hung in the air. The long day stretched on to ten in the evening, holding off the night. Markham was reminded, as he checked a calculation in the pale late light, that elsewhere on the planet someone else was paying for these longest of summer days in the hard coinage of frozen winter nights. Debts mount, he thought. And as he read that evening of the spreading bloom, it seemed a vast one was coming due.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
GORDON WAS LATE FOR A FACULTY SENATE COMMITtee meeting, and hurrying, when Bernard Carroway intersected his trajectory. “Oh, Gaw-dun, I need to speak with you.” Something in Bernard’s tone made Gordon stop.
“I heard about this thing you have on with Shriffer. Saw a diddle about it on the late news—one of my students rang me to have a look.” Carroway clasped his hands behind his back, the gesture giving him a judicial appearance.
“Well… yes, I think Saul went a little overboard—”
“Glad to hear you say so!” Bernard was suddenly jovial. “I spotted it as a, well, Saul is given to excess in this sort of thing, you know.” He peered at Gordon for confirmation.
“Sometimes.”
“Couldn’t imagine anything more unlikely, myself—nuclear magnetic resonance experiments, he said? Bloody odd way to communicate.”
“Saul thinks part of it, ah, the message, is astronomical coordinates. You’ll remember when I came to you—”
“That’s the basis of it, then? Merely some coordinates?”
“Well, he did break down the pulses into that picture,” Gordon admitted lamely.
“Oh, that. Looks for all the world like a child’s scrawling to me.”
“No, there’s structure there. As for the content, we don’t—”
“I think you have to be careful in this, Gaw-dun. Understand, I like some of Shriffer’s work. But I and others in the astronomical community feel he’s, well, perhaps rather overstepped himself in this radio communication thing. And now this!—finding messages in nuclear resonance experiments! I think Shriffer’s quite exceeded the bounds.”
Bernard nodded seriously and peered down at his feet. Gordon wondered what to say. Bernard had a gravity about him that warded off direct contradiction. He carried his excess weight with an aggressive energy that seemed to dare anyone to make anything of it. He was short with the kind of barrel chest which, when he relaxed, would suddenly reveal itself to be merely an elevated stomach, held aloft with resolve. It sagged now as Gordon watched; Bernard had forgotten it in his concentration on the sins of Shriffer. His herringbone jacket bulged, the buttons strained. Gordon imagined he could hear Bernard’s belt creak with the sudden new pressure. This torture of his wardrobe was redeemed by the unconscious flush of pleasure which spread across Bernard’s serious face as his belly descended.
“It puts a black eye on the whole game, you know,” Bernard said abruptly, looking up. “Black eye.”
“I think until we get to the bottom—”
“The bottom is that Shriffer’s foxed you in with him, Gaw-dun. I’m sure none of it was your idea. I’m sorry our department has to be mixed in with his foolery. You’ll put paid to it, if you’re wise.”
This advice delivered, Bernard nodded and walked on.
Cooper glanced up as Gordon came into the laboratory. “Mornin’, how are you?” Cooper said.
Gordon reflected sourly that people routinely asked you how you were, as a formal greeting, when in fact they had not the slightest interest. “I feel like crap on a soda cracker,” Gordon muttered. Cooper frowned, puzzled. “You saw the TV last night?” Gordon asked.
Cooper pursed his lips. “Yes,” he said, as though he were giving a good deal away.
“I didn’t mean to let it get out of our hands like that. Shriffer took the ball and ran with it.”
“Well, maybe he scored a touchdown.”
“You think so?”
“No,” Cooper admitted. He leaned over and adjusted a setting on an oscilloscope, rather obviously having said all he wanted to. Gordon shrugged his shoulders as though they had weights attached. He would not try to puncture Cooper’s blithe goyische brass, so Well concealed beneath the cloak of unconcern.
“Any new data?” Gordon asked, cramming his fists into his pants pockets and pacing around the lab, inspecting, feeling a certain private pleasure at the thought that here, at least, he knew what was happening and what mattered.
“I’ve got some good resonance lines. I’m carrying on with the measurements we agreed I should make.”
“Ah, good.” See I’m only doing what we agreed I should. You won’t catch me with an unexpected result, nossir.
Gordon paced some more, checking the instruments. The nitrogen dewar popped with its brittle cold, transformers hummed, pumps chugged bovinely. Gordon read through Cooper’s lab notebook, looking for possible sources of error. He wrote out from memory the simple theoretical expressions which Cooper’s data should confirm. The numbers fell reassuringly close to the theoretical mark. Beside Cooper’s schoolboy neatness Gordon’s sprawling handwriting seemed a raffishly human intrusion on the neat, remorseless rectangularity of the gridded pages. Cooper worked in precise ballpoint; Gordon used a Parker fountain pen, even for quick calculations such as this. He preferred the elegant slick slide and sudden choking death of pens, and the touch of importance their broad blue lines gave to a page. One of the reasons he had switched from white shirts to blue was the doomed hope that ink stains on the left breast pocket would be easier to conceal.